Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 08m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 18.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board convenes in open session at 7 PM.
On this day in 1877, the Wimbledon Championships begin:
The inaugural 1877 Wimbledon Championship started on 9 July 1877 and the Gentlemen’s Singles was the only event held. It was won by Spencer Gore, an old Harrovian rackets player, from a field of 22. About 200 spectators paid one shilling each to watch the final.[13]
The lawns at the ground were arranged so that the principal court was in the middle with the others arranged around it, hence the title “Centre Court“.[c] The name was retained when the Club moved in 1922 to the present site in Church Road, although no longer a true description of its location.[15] However, in 1980 four new courts were brought into commission on the north side of the ground, which meant the Centre Court was once more correctly described. The opening of the new No. 1 Court in 1997 emphasised the description.
Recommended for reading in full —
Jeffrey Rosen writes Happy 150th Birthday, 14th Amendment:
On July 9, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution turns 150. On the same day, President Donald Trump will nominate a new Supreme Court justice to replace Anthony Kennedy, who, more than anyone else in America, has defined the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment for the past three decades.
The convergence of these momentous events is appropriate. Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was originally intended to allow Congress and the courts to protect three fundamental values: racial equality, individual rights, and economic liberty. But the amendment was quickly eviscerated by the Court, and for nearly a century it protected economic liberty alone.
….
After the Civil War, many of the former Confederate states passed laws known as the “Black Codes,” which sharply limited the rights of former enslaved people. In response, on July 9, 1868, Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law and also denies any state the right to deprive people of liberty without due process.
Only five years later, the Supreme Court eviscerated the amendment in the 5–4 Slaughterhouse Cases decision. As drafted by the Ohio congressman John Bingham, the amendment was intended to require states as well as the federal government to respect the fundamental liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
A decade later, in a lopsided 8–1 decision, the Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned discrimination in public accommodations and transportation. Finally, in 1896, the Court upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, standing aside as the South constructed the Jim Crow regime. Justice John Marshall Harlan provided the only dissent. In one of the most famous passages in the history of Supreme Court opinions, he wrote: “There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.”
William H. Frey writes US white population declines and Generation ‘Z-Plus’ is minority white, census shows:
The U.S. Census Bureau’s release of race and age statistics for 2017points to two noteworthy milestones about the nation’s increasingly aging white and growing diverse population. First, for the first time since the Census Bureau has released these annual statistics, they show an absolute decline in the nation’s white non-Hispanic population—accelerating a phenomenon that was not projected to occur until the next decade.
Second, the new numbers show that for the first time there are more children who are minorities than who are white, at every age from zero to nine. This means we are on the cusp of seeing the first minority white generation, born in 2007 and later, which perhaps we can dub Generation “Z-Plus.”
….
The good news for the nation is that white aging and potential future declines will be countered by gains in racial minorities. These populations increased by 4.7 million in the two years that the white population declined, including gains of 2.4 million among Hispanics, 1.1 million among Asians, and 1.2 million among all other races, according to the new estimates. Moreover, these gains are especially important in offsetting white declines that are occurring among the nation’s youth.
(America doesn’t need to be white, she needs to be free; the former doesn’t – as no race could – assure the latter.)
Jonathan Lemire, Catherine Lucey, and Zeke Miller describe Life in Trump’s Cabinet: Perks, pestering, power, putdowns:
The Cabinet members are lashed to a mercurial president who has been known to quickly sour on those working for him and who doesn’t shy from subjecting subordinates — many of them formerly powerful figures in their own rights — to withering public humiliation. Think Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former senator who was labeled “beleaguered” early on by presidential tweet and who has since been repeatedly subjected to public criticism.
For all his bad press, Pruitt managed to last longer than many in Washington had expected. But on Thursday, Trump tweeted that Pruitt had resigned, adding that the EPA chief had done an outstanding job — “within the agency.” A senior administration official not authorized to discuss the situation publicly later said that Pruitt had been pushed by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to tender his resignation Thursday amid the mounting scandals.
Trump’s Cabinet, a collection of corporate heavyweights, decorated generals and influential conservatives, has been beset by regular bouts of turnover and scandal. A Cabinet member’s standing with Trump — who’s up, who’s down; who’s relevant, who’s not —is closely tied to how that person or their issue is playing in the press, especially on cable TV.
Dan Merica reports How soybeans — yes, soybeans — could impact the midterm elections:
“This isn’t just numbers on a sheet or percentage of trade or dollar value,” said Michael Petefish, a 33-year old Trump supporter and fifth generation farmer in southern Minnesota.
Standing on the farm he will likely run for the next 40 years, he added, “This is multi-generational American families, your base, that you are now squarely putting into financial peril.”
Petefish is one of the thousands of farmers who have seen the price of their crops tank in the face of escalating trade rhetoric between the United States and China. Growers in the area talk of their farms losing over $200,000 in value as commodity prices slump, all while the back and forth between the two countries has played out like a game of chicken, with each side trying to one up each other by raising the size of tariffs they plan to implement on each other.
(Petefish’s candidate has put far more than soybean farmers in peril; he and others selfishly thought they deserved more, only to find they’ll get less.)
Here’s Why World Cup Balls Look So Weird Every Tournament: